The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
In 2010, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer canceled the Border Governors Conference, an annual event that brought Mexican and American politicians, experts and federal agency officials together to coordinate on border issues since the 1990s.
Arizona was set to host the conference that year but was unable to convince several Mexican governors to attend after the passage of SB 1070, a controversial bill requiring law enforcement to check the immigration status of people deemed suspicious of being in the United States illegally. Over the next decade, the conference faded away, leaving the border region less prepared to collaborate in times of crisis.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S.- Mexico border in the spring of 2020, vaguely worded shutdown orders led to confusion over which factories could remain open. By April, more than 320 American companies had written to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador asking for their manufacturing facilities to be designated as essential.
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In many cases, they would have been better off leveraging state and local connections. In Mexico and the United States, states implemented their own lockdown measures, sometimes shutting down all manufacturing indiscriminately.
In the confusion, some foreign businesses refused to comply with lockdown orders in Mexico, allowing the virus to spread between employees. In Baja California, Gov. Jaime Bonilla shut down a plant manufacturing ventilators for export because they refused to sell their products locally. In the chaos of the early pandemic, the United States and Mexico both lost when local actors were unable to cooperate.
Although the federal governments in both countries control the movement of goods and people across their borders, border states can be a part of the process if they are politically organized.
In 1999, the Border Governors Conference Joint Declaration asked the U.S. and Mexican federal health agencies to implement the Binational Border Infectious Disease Surveillance Program (BIDS), a collaboration between border states and federal agencies to improve information sharing and surveillance of infectious diseases.
In the 2010s, BIDS developed a protocol for cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico in public health events and facilitated emergency health exercises in the border region. However, like the Border Governors Conference, BIDS has suffered from a lack of attention from regional politicians. For example, Arizona has not issued its annual report on binational disease appearances in the state since 2013.
In every year of the 2000s, the Border Governors Conference voiced its support for increased collaboration between border states on issues of public health.
After the 2001 conference, the governors created a commission of experts to respond to the drug abuse problem along the border, resulting in policy recommendations for authorities in both the U.S. and Mexico.
In 2003, the Health Work Table of the Border Governors Conference conducted a follow-up meeting to create the Binational Border Health Information System (BBHIS). BIDS acknowledged the contribution of BBHIS’s surveillance system in California and Baja California in controlling measles and rubella in the region.
In 2020, the Border Governors Conference could have provided an opportunity to coordinate policies related to COVID-19 across border states. Just as they did during the drug crisis in 2001, governors could have created special commissions to respond to pressing issues. These commissions could have served as intermediaries between local governments and medical equipment producers to protect essential supply chains or improved case tracking along the border.
The Border Governors Conference has a proven history of improving collaboration between the border states. Reviving the event will give the U.S.-Mexico border region the opportunity to reinvigorate public health agreements and address economic confusion.
Ten years after the Arizona boycott, tensions have cooled and new politicians have taken power. Reestablishing the Border Governors Conference will better prepare the region when the next crisis hits.
James Chabin is a research assistant at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. He graduated from University High School in Tucson and Arizona State University.